I recently noticed that one of my colleagues, a fellow editor, was reading a document set in 10-point type, with the lines running all the way across his giant 21-inch monitor. He was having a terrible time "tracking" from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, and he was squinting, bending forward in his chair, and generally looking miserable.

"Why don't you shrink the window?" I asked.

"What?" he said.

"Size the window so it's not so wide. You'll be able to read more easily."

"How do I do that?" he asked.

"You know those three little boxes on the upper right? The left one minimizes the window, and the right one closes it."

"Yes."

"The middle one makes it so you can size the window." [As you've noticed, my colleague was using a PC. On a Macintosh, you can just grab the lower right of a window and size to your heart's content.]

"Show me," he said.

I took the mouse and clicked the middle "Restore" button (which looks like two cascading windows). Then I positioned the mouse pointer on the right-hand border of the window, pressed and held the left mouse button, and sized the window to about six inches across.

Next, I clicked View > Zoom and bumped up the Zoom size to 200 percent.

"How's that?" I asked.

"Lots better," he said.

If you usually edit a document with the Word window stretching all the way across your screen, you might want to change your strategy. If you were designing a book, you probably wouldn't allow a line length of more than about 24 picas (four inches). Otherwise, the text would be too hard too read. You won't torture your readers, so why torture yourself?

Another thing: If you work with a wide, wide window, you'll find yourself scrolling and scrolling and scrolling back and forth on a line. If your window is relatively narrow, you can often move to a certain word by scrolling one or two lines down (a keystroke or two) rather than 50 characters across. You may not realize how much time you spend scrolling through text, but it does add up.

Finally, remember that you don't have to look at text in its actual size. Zoom was invented for a reason. Go ahead, make your text so you can read it from six feet away. Amaze your friends. Make your life easier. That's what all these tools are for.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

In 2001, I wrote a couple of articles about using sample text while designing a book or generally experimenting with Word:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705763701

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705865120

But if you're tired of lorem ipsum and that quick brown fox, you might be interested in the ungreek.toolbot engine, an online tool that gives you the option of several different source texts from which to generate sample (gibberish) text, including the Rubaiyat, Jane Eyre, the Tao Te Ching, and the Critique of Pure Reason (in German). It's fun to play with, and useful, too:

http://ungreek.toolbot.com/

I've been asked by several readers if there's a way to convert Word comments (Insert > Comment) to document text. It depends on what "convert" means. If you just need to get the text of a bunch of comments, you can open the Comments pane (View > Comments), select all, copy, and then paste to a new document. Easily done.

If you want to turn comments *into* text in the document where the comments live, here's a macro that will do the job:

Sub Comments2Text()
Dim objComment As Comment
For Each objComment In ActiveDocument.Comments
objComment.Reference.InsertAfter " <" & objComment.Initial _
& ": " & objComment.Range.Text & "> "
objComment.Delete
Next
End Sub

If you don't know how to use macros like that one, you can find out here:

Before running the macro, be sure to back up your document, just in case.

As written, the macro puts the initials and text of each comment, in angle brackets, into the document text and then deletes the comment.

If you don't want to use angle brackets, you can change them to some other character or string of characters by modifying the following two lines (note that there's a space before and after the brackets, which you can omit if you like):

objComment.Reference.InsertAfter " <" & objComment.Initial _
& ": " & objComment.Range.Text & "> "

If you don't want to delete the comments, just remove this line:

objComment.Delete

If you wanted to, you could use parentheses--

objComment.Reference.InsertAfter " (" & objComment.Initial _
& ": " & objComment.Range.Text & ") "

--and then use our NoteStripper program to turn the parenthetical comments into footnotes.

You could also use our Puller program to pull items in brackets or parentheses into another file.

Finally, you could format items in angle brackets (or other delimiters) to make them stand out from text. Red would be nice. Here's how:

1. Back up your file, just in case.

2. Click Edit > Replace.

3. In the Find What box, enter this:

<*>

4. In the Replace With box, enter this:

^&

5. Click the More button if it's there.

6. With your cursor in the Replace With box, click Format > Font > Font color > red.

7. Click the OK button.

8. Put a check in the Use Wildcards box.

9. Click the Replace All button.

All of your bracketed comments should now be red.

You can learn more about searching with wildcards in my free paper, "Advanced Searching in Microsoft Word," which you can download here:

Thanks to Jenn Morris for suggesting this topic.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Visual Thesaurus provides a revolutionary way to see words in relation to other words. Fascinating, fun, and useful, all at the same time:

Microsoft Word's AutoText feature provides an easy way to store and then reuse text, graphics, fields, tables, bookmarks, and other items. For example, this newsletter includes the same "Fine Print" section every week. All I have to do is save that text as an AutoText entry, and I can easily insert it in the newsletter without retyping, copying, or pasting. Think of AutoText as your boilerplate library.

You can create, delete, and work with AutoText entries by clicking Insert > AutoText > AutoText. But the AutoText toolbar gives you quick access to AutoText entries that you use a lot. Since I work in a publishing house, I'm thinking particularly of manuscript markup tags or typesetting codes, as explained here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711132842

To display the AutoText toolbar, click View > Toolbars > AutoText. You can identify the toolbar among your many others by its wide button labeled "All Entries."

HD1Now, need to insert a Heading code? Click "All Entries" on the AutoText toolbar. Then click "Heading Tags." Then click "Heading 1" to insert the Heading 1 tag. What? You don't *have* an entry for "Heading Tags"? Let's fix that right now:

1. Create a paragraph style called "Heading Tags." Strange as it may seem, Word uses the style of the text you select as the group name for AutoText entries you create.

2. Type the text you want to store as an AutoText entry--HD1, for example.

3. Apply your new "Heading Tags" style to that text.

4. Select the text.

5. On the AutoText toolbar, click the "New" button.

6. Enter a name (at least five characters) for your AutoText entry--"Heading 1," in this case.

7. Click the "OK" button.

There, you've now got a "Heading Tags" group, and within that group you've got a listing for "Heading 1." Here's how to use them:

1. On the AutoText toolbar, click "All Entries."

2. Click "Heading Tags."

3. Click "Heading 1."

Presto! "HD1" appears in your document, formatted with the style you originally gave it. That's kind of neat, because it means you can make different text levels stand out by defining the style to use a specific font or color.

If you don't *want* your code to be formatted with a style, just format your text with the Normal style before creating your AutoText entry. Your entry will then appear under "Normal" when you click "All Entries" on the AutoText toolbar.

Think this might be useful? Good!

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

MicroType provides a free typographic ruler that you can download and print on transparent film. Then you can place it over printed copy to determine font sizes, line spacing, and rule weights.

http://www.microtype.com/typometer.html

I'm often faced with the task of creating a bibliography for a book I'm editing, but I hate typing in all those entries from scratch. Lazy fellow that I am, I've figured out an automated way to turn parenthetical notes into bibliography entries. It's longish, but it sure beats doing it by hand. You may need to modify the procedure a bit to fit your own needs. Still, this article will give you the general idea.

Let's say we've got a document full of parenthetical notes, like this one:

(Jack M. Lyon, Total Word Domination [PocketPCPress, 2001], 121.)

The first thing we need to do is get all the notes out of there so we can turn them into bibliography entries, like this:

Lyon, Jack M. Total Word Domination. PocketPCPress, 2001.

If you need to do this with lots of documents, you'll want to look at our Puller program:

http://www.editorium.com/puller.htm

If you only need to do this with a document or two, you can use this sneaky little method:

1. *Back up your documents* in case anything goes wrong. There, you've been warned.

2. Click Tools > Replace.

3. In the Find What box, enter this:

(*)

4. With your cursor still in the Find What box, click the No Formatting button to remove any formatting that may be applied to the box.

5. In the Replace With box, enter this:

^&

6. With your cursor still in the Replace With box, click the No Formatting button to remove any formatting that may be applied to the box.

7. Click the Format button (you may have to click the More button before it's available) and then Font.

8. Under Effects, put a check in the box of an effect you *know* is not in your document. Shadow should do nicely. You'll probably want to avoid using italic or bold, which probably *are* used in your document.

9. Click the OK button. The Replace With box should now be labeled as "Shadow."

10. Put a check in the Use Wildcards checkbox.

11. Click Replace All.

All of your parenthetical notes will now be shadowed. Isn't that exciting?

Now get rid of everything in your document that's not shadowed, leaving only the parenthetical notes:

1. Click Tools > Replace.

2. Clear any text from the Find What box.

3. Click the Format button and then Font.

4. Make sure the check in the box next to Shadow is *blank*--no checkmark, either black or gray.

6. Click the OK button. The Find What box should now be labeled as "Not Shadow."

7. Clear any text from the Replace With box.

8. With your cursor still in the Replace With box, click the No Formatting button to remove the formatting applied to the box.

9. Remove the check from the Use Wildcards checkbox.

10. Click "Replace All."

Wow, the only thing left in your document is a bunch of shadowed text in parentheses. You want each note to be followed by a carriage return, so if some of them aren't, you may need to put some in:

1. Click Tools > Replace.

2. With your cursor in the Find What box, click the No Formatting button to remove the formatting applied to the box.

3. In the Find What box, enter this:

)

4. In the Replace With box, enter this:

)^p

5. Click "Replace All."

Now you may need to get rid of double returns:

1. Click Tools > Replace.

2. In the Find What box, enter this:

^p^p

3. In the Replace With box, enter this:

^p

4. Click "Replace All."

If you think all of this is too much work, you really should check out our Puller program.

What's next? Well, for starters, let's get rid of our opening and closing parentheses:

1. Delete the parenthesis at the beginning of your first note and the end of your last note.

2. In the Find What box, enter this:

)^p(

3. In the Replace With box, enter this:

^p

4. Click "Replace All."

Now let's get those names transposed:

1. Click Tools > Replace.

2. With your cursor in the Find What box, click the No Formatting button to remove any formatting that may be applied to the box.

3. In the Find What box, enter this:

,( *))

4. In the Replace With box, enter this:

^t1

5. Put a check in the Use Wildcards checkbox.

6. Click "Replace All." There should now be a tab following each name in your document. Please note that if you've got "Jr.," "Sr.," "Ph.D.," and so on with some of those names, you'll need to get the tab *after* the suffixes and make sure your commas are right. Remember that you can use Find and Replace to help you with this.

7. Click Edit > Select All to select all the text in your document.

8. Click Table > Convert > Text to Table.

9. In the dialog box that appears, make sure "Number of columns" is set to 2 and "Separate text at" is set to Tabs.

10. Click the OK button. Your notes are now in two columns, with names in the first one and the bookish stuff in the second one.

11. Use your mouse to point at the top of the first column. A little black arrow should appear, pointing down.

12. Click the left mouse button to select the column.

13. Click Edit > Copy to copy the column.

14. Create a new blank document.

15. Click Edit > Paste. The name column should now be all by itself in the new document.

16. Put your cursor somewhere in column and click Table > Select > Table to select the column.

17. Click Table > Convert > Table to Text.

18. Under "Separate text with," select "Paragraph marks" and click the OK button. You've now got a list of names *not* in a table.

19. Download and install our free NameSwapper macro:

http://www.editorium.com/freebies.htm

20. Run the macro to transpose all those names to last name first. Pretty slick, no? Don't go sorting names or deleting duplicates just yet.

21. You guessed it, click Edit > Select All to select all those transposed names.

22. Click Table > Convert > Text to Table.

23. In the dialog box that appears, make sure "Number of columns" is set to 1 and "Separate text at" is set to Paragraphs.

24. Click the OK button. Your names are now back in a column.

25. Put your cursor somewhere in the column and click Table > Select > Table to select it.

26. Click Edit > Copy to copy the column.

27. Switch back to your main document.

28. Use your mouse to point at the top of the first column. That little black arrow should appear again.

29. Click the left mouse button to select the column.

30. Click Edit > Paste Cells to replace the column with your new one full of nicely transposed names.

Wow, thirty steps! That may be a record. I sure hope I got them all right.

Now let's de-table-fy your notes:

1. Put your cursor somewhere in the table and click Table > Select > Table to select it.

2. Click Table > Convert > Table to Text.

3. Under "Separate text with," select "Other" and put some weird character in the little box. I like to use the tilde character (~), which you'll find on the upper left of your keyboard. Click the OK button to get rid of the table cells and hook your names back up with their notes.

Easy sledding from here, so I won't outline the rest of the steps in detail, but here's the basic procedure:

1. Remove the check from the Use Wildcards checkbox.

2. Find the tildes and replace them with nothing.

3. Find all occurrences of a space followed by an opening bracket ( [) and replace them with a period followed by a space (. ).

4. Get rid of the closing brackets and page numbers by doing a wildcard search for this (yes, this will work on a Macintosh)--

]*[^013]

--and replacing it with this (note the period):

.^p

5. Replace Shadow with Not Shadow.

6. Sort the notes alphabetically and get rid of duplicates, using the automated techniques explained here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1702467672

7. Go to the top of your document and type "Bibliography." You'll probably need to do some cleanup, but basically you're done. Now, wasn't that easier than typing all those entries by hand?

To learn more about searching with wildcards, download our free paper "Advanced Find and Replace in Microsoft Word":

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/advancedfind.zip

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Need more help automating bibliographies and notes? You may want to look at EndNote, a Microsoft Word add-in designed specifically for that purpose:

http://www.endnote.com/enhome.asp

Many of the books I edit in Word are loaded with footnotes, and I've often wished I had a way to see notes and text at the same time while scrolling through them independently. Comes the dawn! It's easy:

1. Open your footnote-laden document.

2. Make sure you're looking at the document in Normal view (View > Normal.)

3. Open your document in a new window by clicking Window > New Window. You'll now have two instances of your document open. Any change you make in one will be reflected in the other, but you can scroll through them independently.

4. Arrange and size your two windows so they're displayed on your screen side by side. (If you have our Editor's ToolKit program, click Windows > Arrange Documents to do this automatically.)

5. In one of the windows (I like the one on the right) open the Notes pane so you can see your notes (View > Footnotes).

6. Use your mouse to grab the divider bar between the Notes pane and the body text. Drag the bar to within about half an inch of the top of your Word window. (If you go too far, the Notes pane will close.) Now most of that window will be taken up by your notes.

7. Use CTRL + SHIFT + F6 to jump back and forth between the two windows while scrolling independently through them to your heart's content.

Now you can see and edit your notes and text at the same time.

You can learn more about Editor's ToolKit here:

http://www.editorium.com/14857.htm

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Literary Machine is one of the most interesting programs I've looked at in quite a while. If you need a way to store free-form notes and ideas, retrieve them at will, and compile them into a document, Literary Machine may be just what you're looking for:

http://www.literarymachine.com

This powerful program comes in two versions: 2000 and Pro. The 2000 version is free but lacks some of the Pro features, and at $20 the Pro version is a bargain. Both versions have a fairly steep learning curve, but I'd like to share some tips that may make things easier if you're interested in trying the program.

The basic element in Literary Machine is the Item, which is simply an independent text note. Literary Machine is designed to hold lots of these. When you're planning your novel and have a plot idea, you'll create a new Item and type your idea into it. When you have another idea, you'll create another Item and type away.

But how will you find your Items again after you've put them away? Before you put them away, you'll assign one or more Concepts to each Item. Concepts are represented by words in a window on the Literary Machine desktop. Drag a Concept word to an Item, and the Item will be associated with that Concept. Drag a Concept word to the desktop, and the Items associated with the Concept will be displayed as small note cards, which you can move around at will.

The idea of associating Concepts with Items is a little difficult to understand, because it's exactly the opposite of how we usually think. Ordinarily, we think of documents as being *under* a certain category. In Literary Machine, categories (Concepts) are *associated* with documents (Items).

Another idea that's a little difficult to grasp is that Concept words and Concepts aren't really the same thing. Here's why: Let's say you have a bunch of Items that discuss cats and a bunch of other Items that discuss canaries. These Items are categorized appropriately using the separate Concepts "cats" and "canaries." Now let's say you have a single Item that discusses the *interaction* of cats with canaries. Yes, you could file it under "cats" and you could also file it under "canaries." But what if that was the *only* Item you wanted to find among a whole bunch of Items on either cats or canaries? You'd have to create a "hybrid" Concept that contained *both* words, "cats" and "canaries," and assign the new Concept to that Item. Then, when you drop the Concept word "cats" or the Concept word "canaries" on the desktop, this "hybrid" Concept will appear along with the two separate Concepts. If you then drop one of the words (it doesn't matter which) from the hybrid Concept onto the desktop, you'll get *only* the Item that discusses both cats *and* canaries. In other words, a hybrid Concept is a way to file and retrieve an Item by combining Concept words. In computer language, it's an "AND." I want to find *only* the Items that are filed under "cats" AND "canaries." The separate Concepts would find the Items filed under "cats" OR "canaries." Remember, though, that you have to *assign* the hybrid Concept to the Items you want to retrieve rather than just dropping the two separate Concept words on the desktop.

Once you've got the Items in the order you want, how can you save them in that order? That's where Projects come in. You create a Project and add your selected Items to it. Then, by dropping the Project on the desktop, you'll display the same *Items* in the same *order* that you had before. You can export a Project, or multiple Projects (think "chapters"), as a separate file (think "book"). You can arrange Projects hierarchically as folders and subfolders, and if you export a group of Projects as an HTML file, the file will include the Project names as Word Heading paragraph styles.

There's one more way to find stored Items--by using the Find function, just as you would in Microsoft Word or other programs. The Items or Concepts containing the search word will be displayed on the desktop.

The program has many other terrific features, but they'll take time and thought to master. You'll probably find, however, that the result is worth the effort.

Another thing I like about Literary Machine is that its genius (literally) creator, Gunnar Sommestad, is open to suggestions about how the program should work, and he's constantly improving it. I, for one, am planning to support his efforts. In fact, I've created a macro that will convert Word documents to Items in Literary Machine. If you're interested in having the macro, let me know:

mailto:editor [at symbol] editorium.com

The newsletter a couple of weeks ago featured a macro that would set all headings in a Word document in true title case, with articles and prepositions lowercased. But what if you have a document in which an author has typed other stuff in all caps--author names in footnotes, or book titles in body text? It would be nice to have a macro that would look for anything in all caps and turn it to title case. I've modified the macro to do just that:

'THE MACRO STARTS HERE
Sub FixAllCapsInText()
'Macro created 10/19/2003 by Jack M. Lyon
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = "[A-Z]{2,}"
.Replacement.Text = ""
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindStop
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchWildcards = True
End With
Selection.Find.Execute
While Selection.Find.Found = True
Selection.Range.Case = wdTitleWord
Select Case Selection.Range
Case "A", "An", "As", "At", "And", "But", _
"By", "For", "From", "In", "Into", "Of", _
"On", "Or", "Over", "The", "Through", _
"To", "Under", "Unto", "With"
wrd.Case = wdLowerCase
Case "Usa", "Nasa", "Usda", "Ibm", "Nato"
wrd.Case = wdUpperCase
End Select
Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
Selection.Find.Execute
Wend
MsgBox "Finished!", , "Fix All Caps in Text"
End Sub
'THE MACRO ENDS HERE

If you don't know how to use macros like that one, you can learn how here:

The key to the macro is this line:

.Text = "[A-Z]{2,}"

That tells Word to do a wildcard search for two or more capital letters in a row. If you like, you can make that number larger to avoid such common acronyms as USA and NASA. A better way to take care of such items, however, is to list them in the following line of the macro:

Case "Usa", "Nasa", "Usda", "Ibm", "Nato"

For more information, see the newsletter here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1715119894

And the Readers Write column in last week's newsletter here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1715197755

And if you'd like more information about wildcard searching, feel free to download my paper "Advanced Find and Replace in Microsoft Word":

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/advancedfind.zip

Thanks to Linda Northrup for suggesting this topic.

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

Jim Pinkham pointed out that the modified macro in last week's Readers Write column had a mistake on one line:

wrd.Case = wdUpperCase End Select

That should actually be two lines, like this:

wrd.Case = wdUpperCase

End Select

If you had trouble running the macro, that's why.

Johanna Murphy wrote:

"The Title Case Headings Macro is awesome! Although I would need one where you only change one level at a time. Also, I have created other styles which are named OUT and OUTNUMBER (with only 5 levels) that we use a lot in our law firm. How can I change the macro to specify those style names?"

I responded:

To use different styles with the macro, do this:

1. Delete these two lines:

For h = 1 To 9

Next h

2. Modify this line--

myHeading$ = "Heading" + Str(h)

--to something like this:

myHeading$ = "MyStyle"

Last week William T. Buckley wrote, "This is not a huge issue, but it does come up once in a while, especially in limited-space conditions. How do I produce a circled-c 'circa' sign or symbol, not to be confused with a (c) copyright symbol?"

Clarke P Gerber responded, "I've checked several specialist texts (including Chicago Manual of Style; NY Times Manual of Style and Usage) and cannot find any authority for using a circled 'c' as an abbreviation for circa. My own regional bible--The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide--says the following: 'When spelled out in full circa is often italicised. When abbreviated as c. or ca. it is now usually set in roman.'"

Thanks to Jim, Johanna, and Clarke for their messages.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

The Microsoft Office Assistance page has a wealth of resources for Word users, including tips, templates, demos, and quizzes:

http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/